You catch us on a pretty busy day, deadlines fast approaching for our last issue of 2012. That’s the one, of course, that traditionally carries our end-of-year lists of best albums, reissues, films, DVDs and books. This means we’ve all been recently asked to nominate our personal Top 20s, from which John has been compiling the definitive countdown, the full list to be published when he’s finished his painstaking calculations in the Uncut that comes out at the end of November. In bygone days on Melody Maker, things used to get very fractious every year about this time, heated disputes breaking out in the pub as the staff split into bitter factions, ugly scenes developing between the champions of one record and the cheerleaders of its rivals, regrettable words spoken in voices raw with partisan emotion, friendships sundered, serious fallings out a seemingly inevitable consequence of the annual occasion of us naming an Album Of The Year. People used to work themselves up into a considerable lather about this, no chance at all of a result based on an agreeable consensus, even less so one based on a clear-cut majority. The polls as I remember them were always tight, even as today’s contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney is, as they say, too close to call. Sometimes this would result in uneasy, shifting alliances designed to make this or that record the favourite in a crowded field, the feeling sometimes that deals were being done at clandestine meetings in smoky rooms with overflowing ashtrays, the air stale with bitter compromise and broken promises that led to even greater bitterness. For successive generations of MM scribes, picking the Album Of The Year was one of those decisions on which much seemed to hang, and you couldn’t take the process of choosing it at all lightly. I remember one year spreading the rumour that our then-editor, Mike Oldfield, no relation to the boy genius responsible for Tubular Bells, had been so dismayed by the staff’s esoteric nominations that he’d decided to abandon the voting procedure entirely and hand the award to his own personal favourite album of the year, which was REO Speedwagon’s Good Trouble, a record I imagine no one else on the staff at the time had even heard. This caused an enormous amount of huffing and indignant puffing, great exclamations of shock, outrage and betrayal. Petitions were hastily drawn up, plans for a popular uprising made, a delegation formed to confront the autocratic editor in his beastly lair, where he no doubt lurked in the staff’s imagination like the playboy heir of a Third World dictator with a taste for decadent disco, elaborate furnishings, high calibre weaponry and torture. What they would probably have found was Mike asleep at his desk after an afternoon in the pub, snoring seismically. At which point the People’s Revolt would just sort of die out, as even the rebellion’s hardliners, the hot-heads and fire-brands, sloping back along with everyone else to their desks, where a lot of silent sulking would no doubt have morosely ensued as they contemplated the coming embarrassment of working for a music weekly that in 1982 would pick RE-fucking-O Speedwagon as the year’s best album. Ah, those were the days. Anyway, one of the albums I’m keeping my fingers crossed will do well in our poll this year is the self-titled debut by Allah-Las, which quickly became an office favourite when copies arrived a few months ago, a number of us falling hard for the very loud echoes we heard in their retro-jangle of Love and The Byrds or something compiled from obscure tapes by Lenny Kate as a follow-up to the garage rock splendours of Nuggets. The coolest place to see them live, of course, would be at the Whisky-A-Go-Go on Sunset Strip, possibly opening for Buffalo Springfield, but that’s not going to happen, sadly. So we will have to content ourselves with catching them on one of their first UK dates next month, when they arrive for a short tour. Only four dates have been announced so far – at London’s Shackwell Arms (Monday, December 10), Brighton’s The Hope (11), Liverpool’s Leaf (12) and Manchester’s Night & Day (13). Hopefully, there’ll be a few more confirmed in the next couple of weeks. Maybe I’ll see you at one of them. Have a great week. Allan

As you might expect of a book about Leonard Cohen, Sylvie Simmons spends a fair proportion of I’m Your Man writing about love, faith, depression, finance, and the demands and consolations of poetry and women. Mostly, though, the focus of this hefty and thorough book is Leonard Cohen’s charm: about how an exceptionally gifted artist has seduced most everyone who has come into contact with him, through the course of an uncommonly eventful life. Simmons, of course, might not see her book in quite the same light. But among an impressive castlist, she is as vulnerable to Cohen’s wiles as anyone. “I gathered his only interest in the book was that it wouldn’t be a hagiography,” she writes in the afterword, following some 500 pages in which she has assembled scores of Cohen’s associates to testify to his brilliance and loveliness. Former lovers are generally rhapsodic in their praise. “I felt very lucky to have met Leonard at that time in my life,” says Marianne Ihlen who, among other indignities, was dumped in Montreal with her young son while Cohen gallivanted off to the Cuban revolution (he was eventually summoned to the Canadian embassy in Havana; not as a dangerous subversive, but because his mother was worried about him). Whenever domesticity looms, he heads off on another deluded macho adventure: soon after his son Adam is born, Cohen leaves him and his partner Suzanne Elrod to try and fight in the war of Yom Kippur, then flies directly from Israel to another combat zone, Ethiopia. “Women,” he claims dishonestly, “only let you out of the house for two reasons; to make money or to fight a war.” If only they let out men to sleep with other women, too… Remarkably, just one interviewee can find anything bad to say about him. Steven Machat, the son of Cohen’s former manager, “never liked him”. The chaotic Phil Spector collaboration Death Of A Ladies’ Man, Machat notes, “was two drunks… making an album about picking up girls and getting laid. It was the most honest album Leonard Cohen has ever made.” By 2008, however, even Machat is back, helping Tony Palmer reassemble his Bird On A Wire film. What is it about Cohen that inspires such devotion? Beyond the charm and the great art, the figure that emerges from I’m Your Man is droll, reserved, ultimately unknowable. His self-deprecation can be irritating, but the measured beauty of his language means that Simmons is perpetually disadvantaged as his biographer, grappling to describe a man who could do a much more stylish - and to some degree insightful - job himself. As a consequence, I’m Your Man is a triumph of research rather than analysis, and its best sections dramatise Cohen’s work as part of a team rather than as a solitary, internalised figure. There are fine and bawdy characters in the margins, like the poet Irving Layton and producer Bob Johnston (who deserves a biography of his own, incidentally), and vivid recollections of classic recording sessions and amphetamine-charged tours. Cohen heals a sick cat with Buddhist chanting, tries to get Iggy Pop to jointly respond to a personal ad, and arrives at a French festival on horseback. By the end, and a revelatory new poem for one more faithful ex-lover, Anjani Thomas, even a cynic is starting to be cowed by the cumulative adoration. And if Simmons’ writing is sometimes dogged by the romantic clichés associated with singer-songwriters - well, how could it not be? Leonard Cohen, in his life and work, assiduously created so many of them. Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey

If you've ever suspected that Brian Eno's enduring reputation as an avant-garde genius is more mythical than actual, his discography from the past few years makes for a satisfying read. There are contributions to albums by Andrea Corr, Natalie Imbruglia, Belinda Carlisle and Dido, alongside the higher-profile shifts with Coldplay and U2. Eno must be a lovely and useful man to have around, one concludes. He brings experimental strategies to invigorate the studio graft, but he always ensures that a shiny commercial product comes out at the other end. Which, at a guess, he will never play. In his last major Uncut interview, Eno talked about listening to West African music and gospel rather than his own work, and it's easy to conclude that the creative process interests him much more than the finished music. His technology projects back that up, being mostly based around generative music software, designed to produce infinite melodic variations rather than the same old tune every time. Some of us, though, would still prefer to listen to “Music For Airports”, not to mess about with an iPhone app. If a new deal with Warp Records in 2010 signalled a return to the old orthodoxies of album-making, the releases thus far have been disappointing, with Eno avoiding the burden of sole responsibility. Credits have been shared with two accomplished if uninspired multi-instrumentalists, Leo Abrahams and Jon Hopkins (“Small Craft On A Milk Sea”, 2010), and with a poet, Rick Holland (“Drums Between The Bells”, 2011). “Lux”, however, suggests that Eno might work best these days when he stays away from collaborators, and steers clear of proper musicians in particular. A couple of months ago, Icebreaker's rescoring of “Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks” provided a timely reminder of Eno's ambient skills, his uncanny knack of applying a stately gravity to notionally weightless sounds. Lux operates brilliantly in that tradition. Unlike the often fidgety laptop jams of “Small Craft On A Milk Sea”, pleasingly little happens over the course of its seventy-five minutes. Traditional ambient buzzwords like "lunar" and "sepulchral" are drawn inexorably to these suspended notes and minutely fluctuating soundscapes. Reference points are similarly tasteful, with the four movements recalling Morton Feldman, Arvo Pärt and Gavin Bryars, and with piano lines that feel like tentative improvisations on Satie. While "lux" is actually Latin for light, the implication of luxury presents a further open goal to detractors of such conceptually rarefied music - not least because it was originally designed for an opulent salon, as a generative sound installation at the Palace Of Venaria in Turin. Only the rich, perhaps, have the luxury of enough time and space to really enjoy the leisurely, contemplative possibilities of ambient music. That said, “Lux” works on a pragmatic and egalitarian level as more or less the ideal ambient record. Its tone at times recalls his iPhone app, Bloom, but in the concise press release, Eno places Lux as part of his 'Thinking Music' sequence that also includes “Discreet Music” (1975) and the undervalued, mildly sinister “Neroli” from 1993. "I wanted to make a kind of music that existed on the cusp between melody and texture," Eno explained in “Neroli”'s sleevenotes, "and whose musical logic was elusive enough to reward attention, but not so strict as to demand it." The same statement of intent could be applied to “Lux”. If you're looking for environmental set-dressing, for a faint signifier of sophistication, for a sound that lingers like perfume in an elegant space, then Lux is extremely useful. But as a deeper listening experience, it is also unusually compelling and immersive, particularly through headphones, where the slow evolutions seem less textural and more melodically substantial than one first assumes. It's the sort of album that a lot of people probably imagine Eno makes all the time, but in reality rarely does. Perhaps “Lux” is the best kind of Eno album, too. "Music for thinking" does not come overburdened with clever ideas of its own: it just is. Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey

As the first song of Jessica Pratt’s first album begins, you could be forgiven for believing it was a private press folk album from the early ‘70s. The work of a lost canyon comrade of Linda Perhacs, perhaps, or the implausibly lovely efforts of a “Blue” disciple from some one-horse town in the mid-west. In fact, Pratt is from San Francisco, and her self-titled debut has only just been released on a new label, Birth Records, operated by the estimable Tim Presley, who’s made a good few fine records of his own in the past couple of years as White Fence. Presley was quoted on Pitchfork a couple of days ago as having launched Birth purely to put out Pratt’s record. She reminded him, Presley said, of "Stevie Nicks singing over David Crosby demos." That’s a nice way of putting it, but it only goes some way to articulating the loveliness of this close-miked, low-lit album. Mostly, it sounds like it was recorded solo, in small rooms, though the closing “Dreams” features a harmony vocal, quite possibly provided by Pratt herself. That one sounds a little more like a lost Fred Neil song than a Crosby one, though Presley’s comparison is still valid even here: there’s a prevailing distrait wooziness, a sense of songs coming together in a satisfying form as they’re being performed, that is like “If I Could Only Remember My Name”. A couple of contemporary reference points might help, too. One would be Meg Baird, whose records away from Espers – especially the one she made this summer with her sister, “Until You Find Your Green” – have a similar kind of uncanny calm; a certain atmosphere which could be called vintage, but might be better described as timeless. Pratt’s voice is a gently agile one, at times with a fleeting huskiness that recalls Nicks, or some of the languid and forlorn gymnastics of Karen Dalton. It’s hard, though, to avoid a comparison with Joanna Newsom circa “The Milk Eyed Mender”. Pratt isn’t so idiosyncratic, but there are moments – “Bushel Hyde”, for example, which briefly threatens to turn into “Bridges And Balloons” – when there’s a comparable small, fresh sense of wonder to these jewel-like songs; as if, again, they were being recorded at the moment of creation. A really special find, I think, and an artist who promises much, too. The album’s out now – or at least it is a download – but you could start by having a listen to that opening track, “Night Faces”. See what you think… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6snZYt7sTh8 Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey